Tyga Helm

Helme’s practice explores the meeting point between structure and intuition, where organic forms emerge through layered, deliberate processes. Working primarily through painting and panel-based works, she builds surfaces that suggest growth, movement and quiet transformation, inviting the viewer into a space of sustained looking and reflection.

Her compositions are carefully balanced yet fluid, shaped by repetition, subtle shifts in tone and an underlying sense of rhythm. Forms appear to expand and contract across the surface, evoking natural systems, landscapes, cellular structures or atmospheric patterns. This openness allows the work to remain ambiguous and responsive, encouraging personal interpretation rather than prescribed meaning.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS & PUBLICATIONS:

Solo and group exhibitions with Messums (London, Wiltshire and New York), including In the Wings and Landscape Painting Today.
Exhibited at major UK institutions and venues including Mall Galleries (Royal Institute of Watercolours, Pastel Society, Derwent Art Prize), Sotheby’s, Christie’s (New York), and Glyndebourne.
International exhibitions and residencies in the USA, France, Italy, India and Australia.
Artist‑in‑Residence at RHS Chelsea Flower Show (2024), invited by landscape designer Tom Stuart‑Smith.
Work held in significant collections including The Royal Collection, Sir Michael Moritz Collection, and Hauser & Wirth Collection

AWARDS & RESIDENCIES:

Machin Foundation Prize, Royal Drawing School.
Wedlake Bell Award for a Young Artist.
Erasmus Scholarship, École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Strasbourg).
Residencies at Vermont Studio Center (USA), Borgo Pignano (Italy), Dumfries House (Scotland), La Moissie (France), and Sanskriti Kendra (India).
Teaching Fellowship with Nari Gunjan / Artreach, India.

“Drawing from life is where everything begins for me. I’m interested in those untidy, overlooked spaces, the hedge edges, the forest floor, places where growth is constant and slightly chaotic. Returning to the same spot again and again heightens my awareness; colours intensify, forms shift, and the act of looking becomes more urgent. I’m not trying to describe a place as it is, but to capture the feeling of being immersed in it, where observation, memory and sensation start to blur.”